Million Dollar Experiment – Submissions Rolling In

November 4, 2005 by Steve Pavlina

Wow… the new group-oriented Million Dollar Experiment is off to a great start. I already have a backlog of 50 unprocessed submissions from people who want to participate publicly, and more are arriving every hour.

It’s obvious I won’t be able to manually keep the list updated, as it’s likely to grow into the hundreds at least. So I’ll whip up a database for it soon, which should make it easy for me to manage. Programming skills really come in handy sometimes. Rest assured that your submission will eventually be processed if it hasn’t been listed already. I’m also going to offload the list of public participants to its own page; otherwise it’s going to take up way too much space on the main MDE page.

For the public list, I’m most interested in seeing active participation from people who will keep us posted on their progress. Some people have already setup new blogs to write about their experiences along the way, which I think is a wonderful idea. If you encounter a financial breakthrough which you perceive to be a result of this experiment, please let me know about it, so I can share it with everyone else. This is a purely cooperative experiment, not a competitive one. I’ll do my best to organize and link to these resources, using the main MDE page as a central hub. So please bear with me while I get this going. This project was started with the ready-fire-aim approach, so over the next week or two I’ll be working on the “aim” part.

A few people have already told me of unexpected sums of money coming into their life within the first day. That’s wonderful. I’m up to $49 as of this morning, but a few new things have popped up in the past 48 hours that indicate there’s a lot more to come.

I’ve also received a number of good questions about this experiment, so I’ll probably put together a FAQ of some sort. But as a general answer that would fit most of the questions, you can be as flexible as you want to be. While I’m not counting my previously existing streams of income in this experiment, you don’t have to hold yourself to that standard. My goal is to make $1,000,000 extra, on top of what I’m already making through current income sources. Partly I’m doing this to increase the level of challenge, but it’s also easier for me to track new sources than to track increases in old ones because my income normally fluctuates from month to month. So I wanted to make my results a bit more measurable. Also, due to some confidentiality agreements, I can’t reveal all my existing sources of income; confidentiality clauses are common in many publishing and licensing contracts. Also, I’m only going to count new income that comes directly to me, so that excludes my wife’s income, including from the new cookbook she’s about to publish and any resulting deals that may entail.

Is this a scientific experiment? Not remotely. It’s a subjective experience. We can’t use the scientific method to measure what we’re doing because the observer and the observed cannot be separated. The whole notion of this experiment is based on the potential for thought to have some degree of creative power, so if that is true, we cannot simultaneously buy into this paradigm and still remain an aloof observer. This is something that must be experienced from the inside; it cannot be experienced from the outside looking in. The outside-in lens will introduce conflicting intentions that will corrupt your experience because you cannot passively observe an intention without changing it. This experiment is about testing the creative power of thought from within a different paradigm of reality than the one in which the scientific method was designed to measure. Think of it this way — the scientific method assumes strict separation between the observer and the observed, but this experiment is intended to explore the degree to which that separation may not actually exist.

Later today I’ll also record and post a new podcast. The topic will be “How to make money without a job,” which should be relevant to this experiment. I’ll share some insights on how I make money through mostly passive income sources.